IS top command dominated by ex-officers in Saddam's army

FILE
- In this March 20, 2009, file photo, U.S. Army soldiers stroll
past two bronze busts of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in
the Green Zone in Baghdad, Iraq. Under its leader, Iraqi jihadi
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State group's top command is
dominated by former officers from Saddam's military and
intelligence agencies, according to senior Iraqi officers and top
intelligence officials. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban,
File)eapcontent.ap.org

BAGHDAD (AP) — While attending the Iraqi army's artillery school
nearly 20 years ago, Ali Omran remembers one major well. An
Islamic hard-liner, he once chided Omran for wearing an Iraqi
flag pin into the bathroom because it included the words "God is
great."

"It is forbidden by religion to bring the name of the Almighty
into a defiled place like this," Omran recalled being told by
Maj. Taha Taher al-Ani.

Omran didn't see al-Ani again until years later, in 2003. The
Americans had invaded Iraq and were storming toward Baghdad.
Saddam Hussein's fall was imminent. At a sprawling military base
north of the capital, al-Ani was directing the loading of
weapons, ammunition and ordnance into trucks to spirit away. He
took those weapons with him when he joined Tawhid wa'l-Jihad, a
forerunner of al-Qaida's branch in Iraq.

Now al-Ani is a commander in the Islamic State group, said Omran,
who rose to become a major general in the Iraqi army and now
commands its 5th Division fighting IS. He kept track of his
former comrade through Iraq's tribal networks and intelligence
gathered by the government's main counterterrorism service, of
which he is a member.

It's a common trajectory.

Under its leader, Iraqi jihadi Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic
State group's top command is dominated by former officers from
Saddam's military and intelligence agencies, according to senior
Iraqi officers on the front lines of the fight against the group,
as well as top intelligence officials, including the chief of a
key counterterrorism intelligence unit.

The experience they bring is a major reason for the group's
victories in overrunning large parts of Iraq and Syria. The
officers gave IS the organization and discipline it needed to
weld together jihadi fighters drawn from across the globe,
integrating terror tactics like suicide bombings with military
operations. They have been put in charge of
intelligence-gathering, spying on the Iraqi forces as well as
maintaining and upgrading weapons and trying to develop a
chemical weapons program.

Patrick Skinner, a former CIA case officer who has served in
Iraq, said Saddam-era military and intelligence officers were a
"necessary ingredient" in the Islamic State group's stunning
battlefield successes last year, accounting for its
transformation from a "terrorist organization to a proto-state."

"Their military successes last year were not terrorist, they were
military successes," said Skinner, now director of special
projects for The Soufan Group, a private strategic intelligence
services firm.

How officers from Saddam's mainly secular regime came to infuse
one of the most radical Islamic extremist groups in the world is
explained by a confluence of events over the past 20 years —
including a Saddam-era program that tolerated Islamic hard-liners
in the military in the 1990s, anger among Sunni officers when the
U.S. disbanded Saddam's military in 2003, and the evolution of
the Sunni insurgency that ensued.

The group's second-in-command, al-Baghdadi's deputy, is a former
Saddam-era army major, Saud Mohsen Hassan, known by the
pseudonyms Abu Mutazz and Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, according to
the intelligence chief. Hassan also goes by Fadel al-Hayali, a
fake name he used before the fall of Saddam, the intelligence
chief told The Associated Press. Like others, he spoke on
condition of anonymity to discuss the intelligence.

During the 2000s, Hassan was imprisoned in the U.S.-run Bucca
prison camp, the main detention center for members of the Sunni
insurgency, where al-Baghdadi also was held. The prison was a
significant incubator for the Islamic State group, bringing
militants like al-Baghdadi into contact with former Saddam
officers, including members of special forces, the elite
Republican Guard and the paramilitary force called Fedayeen.

In Bucca's Ward 6, al-Baghdadi gave sermons and Hassan emerged as
an effective organizer, leading strikes by the prisoners to gain
concessions from their American jailers, the intelligence chief
said.

Former Bucca prisoners are now throughout the IS leadership.
Among them is Abu Alaa al-Afari, a veteran Iraqi militant who was
once with al-Qaida and now serves as the head of IS's "Beit
al-Mal," or treasury, according to a chart of what is believed to
be the group's hierarchy provided to the AP by the intelligence
chief.

Al-Baghdadi has drawn these trusted comrades even closer after he
was wounded in an airstrike earlier this year, the intelligence
chief said. He has appointed a number of them to the group's
Military Council, believed to have seven to nine members — at
least four of whom are former Saddam officers. He brought other
former Bucca inmates into his inner circle and personal security.

Saddam-era veterans also serve as "governors" for seven of the 12
"provinces" set up by the Islamic State group in the territory it
holds in Iraq, the intelligence chief said.

Iraqi officials acknowledge that identifying IS leadership is an
uncertain task. Besides al-Baghdadi himself, the group almost
never makes public even the pseudonyms of those in its hierarchy.
When leaders are killed, it's often not known who takes their
place — and several have been reported killed multiple times,
only to turn up alive. Figures are believed to take on new
pseudonyms, leaving it unclear if a new one has emerged or not.

"IS's military performance has far exceeded what we expected. The
running of battles by the veterans of the Saddam military came as
a shock," a brigadier general in military intelligence told the
AP, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive
topic. "Security-wise, we are often left unable to know who
replaces who in the leadership. We are unable to infiltrate the
group. It is terrifying."

Estimates of the number of Saddam-era veterans in IS ranks vary
from 100 to 160 in mostly mid- and senior-level positions,
according to the officials. Typically, they hail from
Sunni-dominated areas, with intelligence officers mostly from
western Anbar province, the majority of army officers from the
northern city of Mosul and members of security services
exclusively from Saddam's clan around his hometown of Tikrit,
said Big. Gen. Abdul-Wahhab al-Saadi, a veteran of battles
against IS north and west of Baghdad.

For example, a former brigadier general from Saddam-era special
forces, Assem Mohammed Nasser, also known as Nagahy Barakat, led
a bold assault in 2014 on Haditha in Anbar province, killing
around 25 policemen and briefly taking over the local government
building.

Many of the Saddam-era officers have close tribal links to or are
the sons of tribal leaders in their regions, giving IS a vital
support network as well as helping recruitment. These tribal ties
are thought to account, at least in part, for the stunning
meltdown of Iraqi security forces when IS captured the Anbar
capital of Ramadi in May. Several of the officers interviewed by
the AP said they believe IS commanders persuaded fellow tribesmen
in the security forces to abandon their positions without a
fight.

Skinner, the former CIA officer, noted the sophistication of the
Saddam-era intelligence officers he met in Iraq and the
intelligence capabilities of IS in Ramadi, Mosul and in the
group's de facto capital of Raqqa in Syria.

"And they do classic assassinations, which depends on
intelligence," he said, citing a wave of assassinations in 2013
that targeted Iraqi police, army, hostile tribal leaders and
members of a government-backed Sunni militia known as Sahwa.
Knowing who to assassinate and how to get to them requires good
information, Skinner said, and the IS obviously knew how to
acquire it.

One initiative that eventually fed Saddam veterans into IS came
in the mid-1990s when Saddam departed from the stringent secular
principles of his ruling Baath party and launched the "Faith
Campaign," a state-sponsored drive to Islamize Iraqi society.
Saddam's feared security agencies began to tolerate religious
piety or even radical views among military personnel, although
they kept a close watch on them and saw to it they did not assume
command positions.

At the time, the move was seen as a cynical bid to shore up
political support among the religious establishment after Iraq's
humiliating rout from Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War and the Kurdish
and Shiite uprisings that followed.

"Most of the army and intelligence officers serving with IS are
those who showed clear signs of religious militancy during Saddam
days," the intelligence chief said. "The Faith Campaign ...
encouraged them."

In the run-up to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, Saddam publicly
invited foreign mujahedeen to come to Iraq to resist the
invaders. Thousands came and Iraqi officials showed them off to
the media as they were trained by Iraqi instructors. Many stayed,
eventually joining the insurgency against American troops and
their Iraqi allies.

After the collapse of the Saddam regime, hundreds of Iraqi army
officers, infuriated by the U.S. decision to disband the Iraqi
army, found their calling in the Sunni insurgency. In its early
stages, many insurgent groups were relatively secular. But
Islamic militants grew in prominence, particularly with the
creation and increasing strength of al-Qaida in Iraq. Some Sunnis
were radicalized by bitterness against the Shiite majority, which
rose to power after Saddam's fall and which the Sunnis accuse of
discriminating against them.

Al-Qaida in Iraq was initially led by a Jordanian militant, Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, and had a strong foreign presence in its
leadership. But after al-Zarqawi's death in a 2006 U.S.
airstrike, his Iraqi successor, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, began to
bring in more Iraqis, particularly former Saddam officers. That
process was accelerated when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi took over after
his predecessor was killed in a 2010 airstrike.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's first two deputies, who each played a
major role in setting up what would become its sweep over Syria
and Iraq, were both Saddam-era officers, according to those
interviewed by the AP. They were Sameer al-Khalifawy, an air
force colonel killed in fighting in Syria in 2014, and Abdullah
el-Bilawy, a former intelligence officer who was killed in Mosul
by the Iraqi military in May 2014, a month before the city fell
to the Islamic State group. He was replaced by the current
deputy, Hassan.

"It's clear that some of these (Saddam-era officers) must have
been inside the core of the jihadist movement in the Sunni
triangle from the beginning," said Michael W.S. Ryan, a former
senior executive at the State Department and Pentagon, referring
to the Sunni-dominated area that was the most hostile to American
forces in Iraq.

"Their knowledge is now in the DNA of ISIS," he said, using an
alternate acronym for the extremist group.

"This melding of the Iraqi experience and what we might call the
Afghan Arab experience became the unique ISIS brand," said Ryan,
now a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, a
Washington-based think tank.

"That brand ultimately became more successful in Iraq than
al-Qaida in Iraq ... and, at least for now, stronger in Syria
than al-Qaida."

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IS top command dominated by ex-officers in Saddam's army

BAGHDAD (AP) — While attending the Iraqi army's artillery school nearly 20 years ago, Ali Omran remembers one major well. An Islamic hard-liner, he once chided Omran for wearing an Iraqi flag pin into the bathroom because it included the words "God is great."